This paper discusses the emergence of a new model of welfare and social assistance in Central and Eastern Europe. It starts by briefly summarizing the most recent social policy developments occurring in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia...

While processes for transition from planned to market economy vary, there is one common outcome from the transition process – more discriminating customers. Growing customer expectations increase the possibility of failing to meet those expectations. In competitive market economies service...

The paper aims at investigating the validity of benefit transfer in the case of transfers between countries highly heterogeneous in income, and demonstrates relative performance of different benefit transfer methods under these conditions. We examine how income elasticity of WTP varies in line...

The paper discusses the meaning and measurement of pro-poor growth and also reviews evidence of pro-poor growth (or the lack of it) in a large cross-section of countries and time periods. The emerging story is that many episodes of growth are not pro-poor and also that although economic reforms...

We present a model of agents facing the uncertainty of two future forms of government who are able to insure against this uncertainty by hiding funds from taxation. In order to choose whether or not to hide funds from taxation, agents need to know policy choices that each government would make...

This paper presents estimates of the unification bonus for East Germans over the period 1991 to 1998. The unification bonus is defined as the discounted value of the difference between a person’s actual income and his or her counterfactual real income stream forecast for a hypothetical...

This study compares the duration of new job matches in the east and west German labour market that formed between the start of the German Economic, Monetary and Social Union in July 1990 and December 2000. The study relies on job duration data drawn from the German Socio-economic Panel. It shows...

This work suggests a connection between the lack of restructuring of the privatized firms in transition and the high level of regulatory barriers faced by the private sector. In this work I suggest that the potential entry of the newly created private firms significantly affects the incentives...